February 6, 2002

1:42 PM

"Blogging" makes Time. And PC Magazine. (Oh no, not again.) So are we all like RuPaul? Now that the mainstream press has done blogs to death (contrary to Dvorak's calling it "a recent overlooked Web trend"), is there any point in insisting on a distinction between weblogs and journals? Or should we just say, as Weblog guru John Barger notes, that "the line between journal and weblog is perfectly blurred"?
posted by pzarquon (2 comments total)

Oops! I forgot ... full disclosure: self link in there. First post - be gentle!

I like Neale's take on the 'outward/inward' criteria: "...Weblogs talk about things that happen regardless of the writer's existence. The subject matter of journals would not be there if the writers didn't exist." Even though we do have 'blog style journals' and 'journal style blogs.'
posted by pzarquon at 1:50 PM on February 6, 2002

While I have always thought there is a distinct difference between weblogs and journals (and journals and diary sites, and personal narrative and journals and dairies and weblogs and.. oh, you know what I mean), I don't think the difference is really defined the way wrongwaygoback puts it.

It's style, presentation of content, depth of content. I don't think type of content (pointing outward versus inward, etc) really is any kind of delimiter between what a weblog (not blog, since that is just defining the tool to create the weblog) is versus a journal, but does come into place when evaluating diaries versus journals, and somewhat for personal narrative.

And then you still have the home page.
posted by rich at 1:53 PM on February 6, 2002